Enabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization Organizations can leverage a highly versatile virtualization technology in their file storage infrastructures to enable data mobility; improve storage efficiency and reduce costs; and seamlessly integrate new technologies such as data deduplication and cloud storage. by Renny Shen Product Marketing Manager White Paper
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Enabling Flexibility with Intelligent File VirtualizationOrganizations can leverage a highly versatile virtualization technology in their file storage infrastructures to enable data mobility; improve storage efficiency and reduce costs; and seamlessly integrate new technologies such as data deduplication and cloud storage.
by Renny Shen
Product Marketing Manager
White Paper
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Contents
Introduction 3
Managing Change: The Challenge 3
Constraints in Responding to Constant Change 3
Consequences of Complexity and Inflexibility 4
Flexibility to Respond to Change 5
Key Benefits 5
Attributes of an Intelligent File Virtualization Solution 7
ARX Intelligent File Virtualization 7
Presentation: Simplifying File Access 9
Automation: Simplifying Storage Management 11
Conclusion 16
White PaperEnabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization
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White PaperEnabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization
IntroductionEnterprises today face the challenge of managing and storing an ever-increasing
amount of data. Not only is data being created at an unprecedented rate, but
regulatory and business needs are requiring data to be preserved for longer periods.
At the same time, IT organizations must do more with less—capital and operational
budgets have not kept pace with the rapid growth in storage capacity requirements.
Virtualization provides an elegant solution to efficiently managing dynamic and
growing file storage environments. A common characteristic of these environments
is the unpredictability of where and how fast data will grow. Much of the management
overhead can be attributed to continually optimizing file storage resources to
accommodate the changing nature of the data they contain. Optimizing for higher
efficiency or lower costs often requires moving data, a task that is operationally
disruptive for users and applications.
The F5® ARX® intelligent file virtualization solution introduces the ability to move file
data without disrupting user or application access. Through file virtualization, ARX
preserves the logical access to files regardless of their current location on storage.
From an operational perspective, this reduces the cost of moving data by reducing
the time and IT overhead required as well as minimizing downtime. From a strategic
perspective, data mobility provides flexibility in the storage infrastructure, which is
necessary for organizations to respond to data growth.
ARX builds on that flexibility with intelligent data management policies that allow IT
to rapidly respond to developing changes in the environment. These customizable
policies automatically place or move individual files to optimize file storage
environments to meet business goals, such as greater efficiency, lower storage
costs, and shortened backup times.
Managing Change: The ChallengeConstraints in Responding to Constant Change
The high rate of data growth is generating constant change in today’s file storage
environments. However, two constraints inherent in current file storage
infrastructures hamper the ability of IT organizations to manage that
change effectively:
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White PaperEnabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization
• Complexity. Today’s typical enterprise storage infrastructure consists of a
complex collection of storage platforms, file systems, and operating systems.
As data continues to grow, organizations add new storage devices, potentially
from different vendors. Unfortunately, these devices often do not work
seamlessly together. This is especially true as organizations begin to embrace
cloud storage, which typically requires standalone gateway devices to
interface with the cloud API.
• Inflexibility. Users and applications are statically mapped to the physical
file storage resources that contain the data they need to access, with many
environments containing hundreds or thousands of individual mappings
(or mount points). As file systems grow, files move, or devices change, these
static mappings are disrupted. Updating them to account for environmental
change requires manual configuration and system downtime.
Consequences of Complexity and Inflexibility
A changing environment creates imbalances between how files should be optimally
stored and how they are actually stored. The complexity and inflexibility of the file
storage infrastructure then makes it difficult to move files to the best storage
location, with the following consequences:
• Inefficiency. Unpredictable growth leads to uneven utilization among
different file storage resources. While there may be specific file servers or
network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are highly utilized, in aggregate,
file storage devices tend to be underutilized, averaging just 40 to 50 percent
capacity utilization in most enterprise environments. This is typically not the
result of underuse, but rather of over-provisioning because there has not been
a simple, non-disruptive way to balance demand or add capacity to file
systems without incurring an outage.
• Higher capital costs. Even as the total amount of data continues to grow,
the majority of it is older or inactive. Inactive data remains on high-cost
storage long after its business value has diminished, because of the disruption
and IT overhead required to identify, classify, and move it to a more
appropriate location. As a result, organizations remain locked into a higher
cost for storage capacity and find it difficult to take advantage of lower-cost
storage options, such as deduplicated storage systems or the cloud.
• Higher operational costs for ongoing management. Every new device
added to meet capacity demands increases environmental complexity and
escalates operational costs. Storage environments become increasingly siloed
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White PaperEnabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization
over time, with each silo needing to be managed as a discrete “island” of
storage. In addition, the proliferation of different storage platforms places an
extra burden on IT staff, who must be trained to manage each of them.
• Higher operational costs for migrating data. In traditional environments,
these operations incur an overhead cost beyond the cost of manually moving
the data. A typical migration project also involves a significant amount of
time for planning prior to the migration, and error-fixing and reconfiguring
affecting client systems afterward. In addition, many IT organizations support
businesses that operate 24×7 and recognize the cost of downtime.
Flexibility to Respond to ChangeThe key to breaking free from the constraints outlined above lies in the ability to
eliminate the static mapping between client and storage resources, which allows
the composition of storage resources to change and data to move freely between
resources, without affecting client access to data. Intelligent file virtualization
provides a layer of virtualization in the network that decouples the logical access to
files from the physical location of those files. With this layer in place, data is free to
move and storage resources are free to change, without the disruption previously
associated with these actions.
The next step in creating a dynamic storage infrastructure is to introduce intelligence
that can respond to ongoing change. The file virtualization layer provides an ideal
location for such intelligence because it is aware of any changes to files as they
occur. Intelligent data management policies can monitor files as they are created or
change over time, and then take appropriate action based on the environmental
conditions. For example, a policy can move individual files to lower cost storage as
they age. Intelligent policy enforcement is a valuable tool for organizations that can
reduce the IT overhead involved in responding to changes in the environment.
Key Benefits
This intelligent file virtualization layer brings several key benefits to the environment:
• Simplified file access. Hundreds or even thousands of physical client-to-
resource mappings can be consolidated down to a much more manageable
number of logical mappings, as shown in Figures 1a and 1b. Even more
important, these logical mappings need never change—they are persistent.
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White PaperEnabling Flexibility with Intelligent File Virtualization
IT staff can perform storage management tasks such as provisioning,
consolidation, and migration without having to reconfigure client systems.
• Increased operational flexibility. File virtualization decouples the logical
access to files from their physical location on storage. Data is no longer bound
to physical storage resources and can be moved at will, without affecting
client access to that data or incurring downtime. This gives organizations more
flexibility to better respond to data growth or ongoing change in their file
storage environment.
• Increased architectural flexibility. By decoupling logical file access,
virtualization abstracts the physical file storage infrastructure from users
and applications. This provides the flexibility to utilize different file storage
technologies, platforms, or devices, as well as change vendors to meet
business and IT requirements over time. Removing the inherent barriers to
infrastructure change helps organizations take advantage of new technologies,
such as solid state drives (SSDs), data deduplication, and cloud storage.
• Ongoing optimization of storage resources. Intelligent file virtualization
automatically optimizes the storage of file data over time based on business
goals. Data management policies monitor both existing and newly created
files and automatically match them with the appropriate type of storage
according to their business value. This is determined using flexible criteria,